Home/Science/Space Photos of the Week: You Can’t Clean Up Space, It’s Too Messier

Space Photos of the Week: You Can’t Clean Up Space, It’s Too Messier

24/03/2018146 Views

Messier 95 is located 33 million light years from Earth and is a barred spiral galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope captured this twinkling galaxy because astronomers are studying the formation of others nearby. Messier 95 has around 40 billion stars and is teeming with younger ones, seen here in the blues.

Talk about seeing Jupiter through rose-colored glasses! Citizen scientists processed this resplendent Juno spacecraft image to highlight the whirling storms and fluffy clouds that hover higher in the gas planet’s atmosphere. Warning: You might get lost in the clouds, so stare at your own risk.

This globular cluster called Messier 62 is only 22,000 light years from Earth and is one of the more irregularly shaped clusters in our galaxy. Its core alone has more than 150,000 stars. And M62 is no newbie in the universe either—it’s a seasoned 12 billion years old!

Back on earth, this stunning night sky is over the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The central bulge of our galaxy appears in the upper right of the image, arching across the sky. At upper left the constellation of Orion is seen with a reddish feature called Barnard’s Loop. The red and pink colors are created by highly ionized hydrogen gas, which indicate the birth of new stars.

NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory captured this image of the sun last week. The long strip of black is a temporary feature called a coronal hole. These openings release a wind of highly charged particles, and as they shoot into space they interact with other bodies in the solar system. This particular coronal hole was associated with a colorful show of aurora in the northern latitudes on earth last week. As these solar particles interact with our own planet’s magnetic field, they create a dazzling show of lights for anyone who’s able to watch.

Located 47 million light years away, Messier 88 is a spiral galaxy, like our own Milky Way. It contains more than 400 million stars and has an active galactic bulge, meaning its center shines more brightly than the rest of the galaxy.

This week we are heading for the stars and we’re going to stay there. In the early 18th century, French astronomer Charles Messier began observing and cataloging nebulae and clusters of stars. In total 100 celestial objects are now known as the Messier catalog, and we’re going to look at some of the prettiest in the stack. Some Messier objects can be spotted with the naked eye on a clear night (if there’s not much false light), but most need to be viewed through a telescope, and usually a small one will do.

Some Messier objects that you might have heard of: the Andromeda Galaxy, Horseshoe Nebula, the Whirlpool Galaxy, and that’s only a few famous ones. Others aren’t as well known. Take M62, which is a globular cluster. These strange collection of stars aren’t galaxies but groups of stars, hundreds of millions of them. To look at these through a telescope and ponder their scale is mind-blowing: M62 contains more than 150,000 stars just in its center, and is estimated to have a total mass some 1 million times that of our sun—taking the phrase “twinkle, twinkle little star” to a whole new level. M62 is also oddly shaped, probably because it’s being tugged on by the gravity of the Milky Way Galaxy where it formed.

Want to keep hanging out in deep space? Check out the full cosmic collection here.